Price: USD 4.95

OS: Android 1.5 and above

I have known Sprite backup since its Windows Mobile days and it does what I tell it to.

But I do know that there are many backup options on the Android platforms. For starters, if your device is rooted. ROM manager enables you to backup your Android device via Nandroid backup and there is Titanium Backup.

Both these backs up to your SD Card, but what if you want to backup to the Cloud.

That’s where Sprite comes in.

What do Sprite backup?

• Contacts (compatible with sync)
• System Settings (find out which ones)
• SMS
• Calendar (compatible with sync) 
• Call Logs
• Bookmarks
• Home screens
• Alarms
• IM and settings
• MMS
• Application Settings (find out which ones)
• Apn Settings
• Photos
• Music (tracks, playlists, album art and more)
• Ringtones
• User Dictionary
• Video
• Voice Recordings
• and much more…

Watch the video below to understand how it works:

Mom’s have been using coupons for a long time. We even heard stories of a family of 5 being fed with $50 using coupons.

Coupons used to exist as scrimps of paper cut out from newspapers offering discounts on specific products sold by shops. It is quite similar to running a sale everyday.

I used to wonder why would they do that. Only after economic classes in junior high did I understand the reason.

The economics of coupons

What those shops is practicing is to target as many customers of different purchasing power to bug from them. Prices are usually priced above the cost price.

To attract potential buyers who are more price elastic ( meaning those shoppers looking for value) they introduce coupons. Coupons do not always result in lower prices so only shoppers who match their spending and look to buy that cheap prices bothers to evaluate.

With coupons, the retailers is able to capture both the inelastic shoppers and the price sensitive ones.

Coupons – Web 2.0 style

Consumer trends have change vastly from the days where coupons are furnish only to bricks and mortar shops. Nowadays, online shopping have become very popular and couponing have evolved as well.

Sites like http://www/CouponChief.com provide a directory where retail shops such as Target or HP can list their coupons.

Shoppers can key in coupon codes at the retailers online Shopping Cart to seek discounted prices or print out  the coupons to bring it to the shop.

Tips for being more savvy with Coupons

Not all coupons result in cheaper price

Some coupons offer discounts only against normal retail sale price. You will need to compare the price you get when you use coupons vs if you don’t use. It might not be worth while to use coupons

Coupons on smaller quantities might be more worth it

Most people think that buying in bulk is more value for money but when it comes to coupon payment, it might be more prevalent that smaller quantities offer the better discount.

Join a coupon forum or group

You might not have the time to research how best to make use of the coupons or where offers the most value for money when it comes to coupon payment but a group that pools brains and intelligence together will yield a much better result.

Conclusion

In this tough economic times, we need to watch our pennies well and even if we do not have cash problems, it helps to live a frugal lifestyle. Do take a look at sites like Coupon Chief which makes coupon discovery much easier for you.

I love listening in on Rahul Sood’s blog. For those who do not know who is Rahul Sood, he is the Chief Technology Officer for HP Global Voodoo Business Unit.

His commentary on things are no BS and entertaining.

Here is an interesting article from him talking about what he feels about Microsoft’s Zune system expereience:

I want to start this blog on a positive note. If not for the Zune team, Microsoft would probably have no chance in the mobile phone market. The Zune team is awesome, they are very talented, and they have done some amazing things to transform a strategically important part of Microsoft.

I removed my rose colored glasses to write the rest of this blog though, it wasn’t easy, because I was once an evangelist of the service.

Imagine if you were renting a house, payments up to date, and one day you went to work and when you returned you found the locks were changed.

I want to start by saying that I like the idea of subscription music when it’s executed well. I do not believe or support piracy. I also don’t like when someone "steals" something from me that I’m paying them for.

This is a serious blog about Zune and subscription music.

Have you ever been in a situation where you get so used to doing something that you don’t pay attention to what’s going on around you? A situation where once you realize what happened you wonder why you didn’t figure it out earlier?

I admit it. Since the beginning I was a very vocal Zune evangelist. I’ve written many blogs on why subscription music and Zune makes sense. I even overlooked the PlayForSure vs Zune DRM confusion. I love the business model, I love all you can eat subscription music, and the new Zune HD is pretty sweet. ..but I’ve been blinded by my own enthusiasm, and I finally had a wake up call a couple of weeks ago.

It started when two of my Zune’s died, and I was going to replace them immediately. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) I didn’t have time to pick up replacements and I ended up back in Calgary.

[Read the rest @ his blog >>]

We are on a spree here when it comes to task management application. So shortly after Nubi Do here, we have taskList.

taskList in itself is a unique task management experience. It does not turn you off but you sort of have the feeling that it follows the system of how a unique individual will do things.

Price

USD 1.99. This for me is at the low range section for iOS applications and specifically as a task management application

How Many Levels of Hierarchical List/Projects

Like Nubi Do, taskList have only 1 level of Lists/Groups. They addressed it as groups which means you can group your tasks as these groups.

Can you specify GTD Contexts?

GTD folks would want to have categories to specify contexts or tags or classify them into

1. Time Specific
2. Location Specific
3. People Centric

In taskList , you can specifiy tags. Each task can have many tags. And during review you can select multiple tags to filter.

Can you specify recurring tasks?

No. This is the first task management application I reviewed in a long time that you are not able to do that. This is very disappointing.

Task Entry

In terms of task entry there is really not much that you need to key in.

You are limited to task descriptions, the group, contact who, info and notes as well as the due date

What I like as well is how easy it is to select the tags. very no bull shit and if you have drawn out a nice list of tags, you can touch them and select them and need not go to another screen.

At times we forget that we are busy people and minimizing the number of screen to traverse will help a lot.

Reviewing: A quick glance of what needs to be done

There is no Today, no Inbox, no Next Actions. But really what it excels in is being minimal and focusing on the core.

The core is that we do things based on certain contexts. And here you are able to quickly filter based on multiple tags.

You can quickly select whether if you want a union of tags or an intersection of tags.

Conclusion

I can fully understand where this application is coming from. As an individual you do not need a lot of functionality to be efficient you need to have a UI that focus on what is important.

This task manager chooses to center on the ease of reviewing by Contexts/Tags.

If you work well with Tagging things this application focus very much on that aspect. For me, I need my repeating tasks very much. Not having that is the greatest let down.

We have reviewed quite a fair bit of task management application here on Productive Organizer (Take a look at my sidebars for reference) and many of them are focused on Getting Things Done.

Nubi Do is somewhat unique in that they have been very early to this yet not used by many. We hope that this post changes your opinion about them.

Price

USD 4.99. This for me is at the mid range section for iOS applications and specifically as a task management application

Flexibility is the key here

Nubi Do prides itself to be a very flexible task management application. It is catered to not just folks who only wants a simple list app but also people who does intensive tracking and planning.

How Many Levels of Hierarchical List/Projects

The downside for Nubi Do is that it has only one level. So what this means is that you can only have lists and tasks in the lists.

Can you specify GTD Contexts?

GTD folks would want to have categories to specify contexts or tags or classify them into

1. Time Specific
2. Location Specific
3. People Centric

In Nubi Do you can make use of Contexts. Each task can only have 1 contexts.

If that is not enough, you can make use of tags. Each task can have more than 1 tags.

Can you specify recurring tasks?

Yes you can. Tasks can recur Every Day,Weeks, Months or Year or Every specific day of the week

Task Entry

Task Entry have been made very smooth as the user can always key in the description of the task and not bother about keying in everything about the task.

If you require to key in more details, you can touch the task and key in more details.

One thing that I don’t understand is the need to specifically Pin to either Today or Next. Pinning as Next I can understand, since u specify that this is next to do.

But pin it to Today? I can only guess that its to make this task something you need to do today, as a quick reference.

Reviewing: A quick glance of what needs to be done

The front page of the application presents to you what are the tasks overdue, what you need to do today and what is next upcoming.

You are then presented with an Inbox to do your processing. And should you are doing your weekly review, you have all your lists of projects here to perform your reviewing

Reviewing: Calendar due tasks

What Nubi do does that is different from competitors is that you get a calendar that you can view at quick glance what tasks are due on which date.

And this Calendar is presented even in the task entry portion when you select a due date to your task.

So you can for example see that it is suppose to be done by this date but there are too much tasks so I postpone it by one day.

I think this is an important feature that might go down very well with some people.

Reviewing:Context/Tags tasks

At every page you are able to at the touch of a button go into context and tag filtering mode.

You however, can only view tasks in one tag or context but not multiple.

Importing and Exporting

Nowadays, the default for task management apps is to sync to Toodledo or Outlook or iCal.

Nubi Do does is enable the user to Import/Export from Google Docs.

Google docs is a good medium to import and export but I think people are looking for a cloud based method of synchronization rather than a file based import and export.

Nevertheless file based import and export has its advantages. And personally for me, I do prefer file based import.

Other FEATURES:

■ Assign priorities and due dates.
■ Attach text notes.
■ Search tasks quickly with a live search.
■ Delete, move or email multiple tasks at a time.
■ Lock & passcode protect individual todo lists.
■ Full screen note viewer with data detection so you can enter linkable email addresses, web addresses and phone numbers.
■ Multiple color scheme options.

Conclusion

All in all, a very competent task management application. Would I switch over from 2Do? Probably not. The cost of switching and reseting my whole system is too much. If 2Do works for me I will stick with it.

The plus side is definitely the Calendar review and the downside, is the single level hierarchy of lists/projects

If you like it do grab it off the market place

Whatsapp for me is one of those software on the iPhone that worked so well that I do not know why people prefer it over their competitors.

I mean, what it does can be easily replicated, and we do have companies coming up with PingChat that does almost the same thing if not better.

This goes to show that it is the network effect that is important vs the amount of functionality it has.

Anyways, Whatsapp is currently in Beta for the Android. I strongly recommend you to download it and see why so many people over at iOS use it.

[Download Whatsapp Beta for Android here >>]

I own an iPod Touch 3G 32GB and used to own an iPod Touch 2G 8GB. The iPod touch to me is a great organizer because

1. You can get many productivity apps off the App Store to enhance you.
2. It makes a great music player. Its DSP is comparable with many of today’s portable devices sans those produced by Cowon
3. It’s a great video player
4. It’s a great youtube video player
5. Its an on the go browser that is very responsive
6. It’s a great game player

But the thing is that many competitors are always trying to gain market share at the expense of Apple and all this while their products are cheap and work just as well.

Archos just released 5 Android Devices with the cheapest 2.8 inch going for USD99.

My take is only for the 8GB because that is the entry level iPod I feel matters most to budget conscious consumers. In the past, the 8GB segment have always been the segment that Apple did not upgrade to the latest generation’s technology. Not anymore.

Great Screen Resolution and Retina Display

If you are going to stare at something for a lot of time a day, you would want something that makes what you look at pleasing.

The retina display  at 326ppi will make most of the things you view on your iPod Touch 4G to be fuller than without it.

The resolution on the 4G is also increased to 960×640 from 480 x 320. This is gonna be a wall of difference in terms of details that developers can size their images and texts.

For a user, you can expect more high quality applications compared to the Tablets or PMP players from Android or webOS.

You will see that there  are many tablets that offer big sizes such as 7 inch or 5 inch yet their resolution stays at 480 x 320 or at most 800 x 600. This is not making full use of the screen size.

Perhaps the cost of producing LCD at high resolution is much higher and they would not be able to hit this pricing point.

Very good performance processor

Compare to other webOS or Android devices, it is imperative that the processor is good so that normal interaction with the gadget does not irked the user.

A lot of China made Android devices ran off poor processors such as the Rockchip 2808 or the Telechip and it just shows off how good the iPod Touch in experience is much better than these gadgets.

The A4 Cortex A8 is the same chip used in the iPhone 4G and iPad. For that pricing we got a really good processor here to handle great gaming and intensive processing applications.

Very Reasonable Pricing

What Apple does well is to test the full user experience and sell it to you. At times we complain that their price is expensive. Like those of the Mac Powerbook and Desktops.

But USD229 for the 8GB is a great price to gain access to a lot of great applications, portable media player, camera and gaming console.

Yes it is more  expensive then some other device but when you compare the user experiences, they just don’t measure up.

… And now for the factors that don’t

Small Display

For a gaming and media playing device, 3.5 inch is so small! Perhaps that is why they are able to keep their price points.

The right screen size could be 5 inch. That to me is the sweet spot.

Battery Life

The battery life for the ipod have always fared worse then their iPhone brothers. The problem is that you are still doing much intensive things over WIFI.

My iPod Touch battery can be drain in 1-2 hours if I use 1-2 intensive applications.

Greater battery life increases the production cost as well. And many china manufacturers knows that.  Many of them may have good specs but the battery life just make the whole experience degrading.

Unable to use in Secured Sites

One of the main reason for getting the iPod Touch is that it serves as a good organizer in areas where we cannot bring camera devices.

With 2 cameras, a lot of folks will not look to the iPod Touch as a PDA to bring to these places.

Conclusion

So the big question is whether I will be upgrading. The answer is a firm no because its got not one but 2 cameras.

The 8GB devices is very attractively priced at USD 229 which comes up to SGD 318. No different then the price when I first bought my iPod Touch 2G

I must say I am really dissappointed with the move to include camera but that can’t be help as most consumers want that and only a small minority of us doesn’t want that.

And Epic games, the creator of the Unreal 3 Game, have tried to replicate their game engine on the iOS platform.

Epic Citadel is the result of their efforts and this may be how future first person action and strategy games look on the platform.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Either download the demo yourself ,or if you can’t run it on your device, check out our coverage in the video above. The game engine is truly amazing on the iPhone 4, especially with the Retina Display. And if this is the future of gaming in iOS, … Nintendo and Sony had better step up their game.

Contrary to what many believe Google Wave is not dead. In fact, news release seem to point to that Google will be releasing Google Wave as an application to be installed on your private server for collaboration.

I think this is a splendid idea. The peeve about google wave is that as the wave gets bigger it really slows down your system. I hope Wave in a box addresses that.

When Wave in a Box rolls out, it will include:

* an application bundle including a server and web client supporting real-time collaboration using the same structured conversations as the Google Wave system

* a fast and fully-featured wave panel in the web client with complete support for threaded conversations

* a persistent wave store and search implementation for the server (building on contributed patches to implement a MongoDB store)

* refinements to the client-server protocols

* gadget, robot and data API support

* support for importing wave data from wave.google.com

* the ability to federate across other Wave in a Box instances, with some additional configuration

One of the problems I had as a designer is to marry how I want the object to look, with what is the actual code that needs to be done to create it.

This tool does it design your object, then provides the codes which you can put into your existing CSS stylesheet.

Some features:

• That it provides clear compatibility information for Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (no IE, of course). You can see exactly which browser versions support your bleeding-edge CSS.
• That it’s visual and real-time.
• That it provides code that works across as many browsers as possible, including browser-specific syntax (think -moz-border-radius for Firefox).
• The wood paneling! It makes me feel like I’m in a sauna.

Check out CSS Maker 3.0 today!